


When We Met Last July

by WaferBiscuits



Category: 2064: Read Only Memories (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Pre-Game Events, Questionable ethics, unintentional misgendering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22421716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaferBiscuits/pseuds/WaferBiscuits
Summary: TOMCAT receives a cryptic email from an acquaintance slash client requesting to meet-up at Stardust. What they don't expect is an impromptu invitation to meet the world's first artificial sapient being.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	1. The Meeting-Place

Majid must have thought turning up the bass would liven things up a bit, TOMCAT thought. They could feel the table vibrating under their fingertips. The last draught of their Fuckin’ IDK rippled in its glass.

A little annoying, especially for noon on a Wednesday.

Leaning on their elbows, TOMCAT focused back on their pocket laptop. It was a burner, like everything else mesh-connectable that they owned. They clicked back open their email app. Hayden’s message was still up. It was an audio-only feed.

Not wanting to be rude, TOMCAT transcribed the email to a text log. Not like they could hear anything with the racket going on anyway.

_FROM: H Webber – SENT: 07/01/63 2100 Hours_

‘Hey, T. Sorry if I’m catching you while you’re busy. Double sorry that I’ve dropped off the face of the mesh this past week. I mean. You know why. Sometimes you just get caught up in a project that you can’t get away from, you know? Anyway, can you meet me at Majid’s tomorrow, maybe half past twelve? I really want to show you how things have been going, maybe catch up a bit? Hope you’re well. Sorry again for the short notice. If you can’t make it just let me know and we can schedule for next Wednesday, maybe? Sorry, you know I don’t know your schedule that well. – H’

Unlike Hayden’s usual practice, the email had been sent without any encryption. Entirely public. Anyone with a smatter of hacking would be able to crack into the mesh and extract it. That had to have been why he was being so vague.

Of course, TOMCAT had an inkling of what it was all about. Last time they had actually seen Hayden in person, he had hired TOMCAT on commission to help tweak and modify a specialized copy of Parallax’s LIPS\\\OS program to get it to seamlessly zipper up with a pretty beefy AI source code that Hayden had been fiddling with for the past odd years.

At the time, he had been pretty cagey about what exactly the code was meant for. TOMCAT knew, though, and Hayden probably knew that they knew. Artificial sapience.

It was a pipe dream, for sure.

But, with Hayden on the forefront, maybe it wasn’t so impossible. Who knows. Either way, TOMCAT would have been lying if they said they weren’t interested, even if the project just turned out to be something as unremarkable as a quirky custom build.

It was almost 12:30. TOMCAT exited the email window and shut their laptop. They looked up to scan the club floor.

Not like there were that many people to scan through. Apart from a couple of crashed-up dancers and some stiff business chuds on their lunch break, the club was about as stiff as a stiff.

Sighing, TOMCAT reached for their drink and knocked back the last of it. Whatever, if Hayden didn’t show up, at least they could get buzzed before leaving.

Ten more minutes passed and TOMCAT was all but ready to pack it up and jet before they spotted someone popping through the front door and shuffling past the bar, a larger person, bald, bespectacled, and altogether entirely unassuming.

Yup, that was Hayden Webber alright.

He was holding something up to his ear, and it wasn’t until he was right at TOMCAT’s table that TOMCAT realized it was an old handheld. That was about as functionally analog as you could get these days.

“I know you’re scared to be alone,” Hayden was saying. He glanced at TOMCAT and mouthed a ‘sorry’ before turning back to the phone. “You can’t come because you need to be at home, and in a few weeks you’re going to have to be able to by yourself a lot more… Yes, because I need to go back to work… No, you can’t come with me to work…”

TOMCAT raised an eyebrow.

Hayden didn’t seem to notice. He was cupping a hand over the mouthpiece to filter out the bass tremors. “I have to go now, okay? I promise I’ll be home soon. Be good. Watch some of the shows I queued up for you. Bye, buddy.” He hung up and stuffed the phone in his jean’s pocket, turning back to TOMCAT. “Sorry about that.”

“The hell was all that fussin’ about?” asked TOMCAT, “and pardon me for bein’ frank, but you look like shit.”

“Yeah, yeah I know.” Hayden wasn’t dressed to fit the Parallax build, instead opting for a stained hoodie, torn jeans and an overall appearance that gave off one word: unwashed. “I haven’t really been sleeping. Too busy with…”

He trailed off, pausing to clutch the bridge of his nose and inhale, crinkling his eyes shut. Despite the gesture, he was smiling, albeit tiredly.

TOMCAT took the pause and leaned in over the table, closing the gap between them by a few feet to not have to yell over the music.

“I reckoned when I got your message last night that this was all about that custom job you had me pullin’ a few months back, right?” they asked, keeping their voice low.

“Whew, yeah…right on the credits.” Hayden chuckled. He was keeping his gaze down at the table, never being one for eye contact. “I activated him last week, nine days ago. Took off a whole month of work expecting to just lock myself up in my house and spend like a week ironing out the snags, but it went without a hitch! No complications, no glitches, no problems.”

“Holy shit,” TOMCAT breathed. Even if they had their suspicions, they still felt blindsided. “So, he? Not ‘it’? So we’re really talkin’ actual, true blue artificial sapience? Not pullin’ my leg?”

“To be honest, in some ways it’s still too early to tell, since he only just started becoming more uniquely verbal outside of standard ROM OS dialogue trees.” Hayden paused and adjusted his glasses. “Most of the code at its core is a catalyst for allowing his personality profile to develop and adapt based on his surroundings. Pure self-determinism. That’s the other reason for why I took off work for so long. I have to be extremely careful in what I allow his outside influences to be this early on.”

“He got a name yet?” asked TOMCAT.

Hayden smiled. “Turing.”

“Heh. That’s cute, hon.”

“The thing is, I really need to observe him interacting with someone other than myself.” Hayden didn’t seem to notice the light jab. “Apart from a contact at Flower, you’re the only other person who’s helped me overcome the mistakes I made with my previous prototype.” He cupped his hands together and leaned against his elbows. “I don’t like to overuse the word ‘literally’, but I literally cannot afford to tell anyone else about this without jeopardizing my work.”

TOMCAT was taken aback, Hayden hadn’t been here for ten minutes and he had already both admitted that he had created sentient life and invited TOMCAT to interact with it. Talk about whiplash.

Better to choose their words carefully.

“I’m honestly flattered, Hayden. Truly. I can’t imagine my work had as much of an effect as that, but I’m tickled right pink. Thanks.” There, nice and professional.

“So you’ll do it? Here, I’ll get you my address.” Hayden plucked a golf pencil and a scrap of wrinkled paper from his pants’ pocket. “Can you come this evening? I’d say now, but I don’t want to overwhelm Turing when he’s already distressed about me not being home. The one thing that’s been hard to nip in the bud is the separation anxiety.”

“Shit, Hayden. Ya sure ya got yourself a ROM or a real kid back there?”

“Honestly? With a little more time, I’m hoping for the latter.” Hayden scribbled his address and slid it to TOMCAT. He looked up and they locked eyes. “Come by at 7. I’ll have Turing ready by then and if you’re not opposed to microwave cooking, I’ll have dinner for you too.”

In any other context, TOMCAT would have backed off then. They had never been one to meet with clients at their homes, let alone have dinner with them. Too dangerous. Too forward. Too much like a date.

But this was different, for multiple reasons, least of all that Hayden didn’t seem like the type to be interested in anything other than work.

TOMCAT grinned. They took the paper scrap. “I’ll see ya’ll then, doll.”


	2. Evening's Glow

Some hours before TOMCAT plugged in Hayden’s apartment address for an auto-cab they looked up the building itself. It’d be boneheaded to not get a lay of the land beforehand. Downright amateur, and TOMCAT was no amateur. 

As nice as Hayden seemed and as willing as he was to renegade against his employer, TOMCAT still found it hard to trust him beyond a confidential commissioner/client relationship. At the end of the day, he was still a Parallax researcher.

And Parallax itself would always be prickly ground for TOMCAT to tread.

TOMCAT didn’t bother to leave Stardust that afternoon, figuring it’d be more productive to kill a few hours to both research Hayden’s neighborhood as well as to casually chat up the folk who tended to come in later in the day. Potential clients and favor-bearers. Rent wasn’t going to pay itself.

\---

The apartment looked like a swanky hotel hallway on the inside, complete with wall sconces and patterned carpeting. The doors were set far apart, a clear indication of just how spacious the rooms were.

The high roller atmosphere made TOMCAT uneasy, like they didn’t fit the aesthetic. They were glad that there was no one in the hallway with them. People who lived in a place like this would probably look at them and assume they were some kind of delinquent punk and call Neo-SF’s finest. The last thing they wanted was a run-in with a rickety old police ROM. 

Hayden’s apartment was the first door to the left of the elevator. 

No time to get cold feet. TOMCAT forced themselves to buck up and ring the buzzer. 

From inside, they could hear Hayden’s voice saying something. His voice was too muffled to make out the words. 

Light footsteps stampeded towards the entryway. The knob twisted awkwardly, jittering in place for a few seconds before shooting to the right. The latch clicked and the door creaked open. 

TOMCAT knew ROMs of all makes and models. A lot of their commission work centered around tweaking modifications to Parallax’s software and allow for the installation of custom homebrew programs to LIPS. 

But what TOMCAT saw in the doorway did not fit any standard personal ROM design. If anything, everything about it was a subversion. 

Weirdly, they felt their body tense with a cold wash of discomfort. 

The ROM that stared back at them had a body that was tall and lanky, with the top of the head barely reaching TOMCAT’S waist. Its head was large, top-heavy, spherical, and illuminated blue with simplified facial features (“like a fish bowl,” TOMCAT thought). It looked like a marionette without the strings. 

It (He?) regarded TOMCAT with a digitized expression that conveyed nervousness. Slit-shaped white eyes with additional worry lines. The line-formed mouth was twisted in a bizarre half-smile, half-frown that looked inhuman. 

He held out a ‘hand’ (four rubber-like fingers at the end of his arm), and without waiting for reciprocation reached out and grabbed TOMCAT’s, clutching it in a vice grip tight enough to make them wince. 

“Hi there. Certainly glad you could join me today. You ready to do a fantastic painting? Well good. Let’s start by having all of the colors run across the screen,” said the ROM. His speech had an affected mature calmness to it, despite having a pitch and resonance resembling a child’s voice. 

“Uh?” TOMCAT felt the ROM tugging on their hand, urging them inside. They dumbly stumbled past the doorway. 

The ROM didn’t seem to notice. “Today, I’m using a double-primed, pre-stretched canvas with a light coating of liquid white.” He chattered, letting go of TOMCAT’s hand to step around them and shut the door. His movements were uncoordinated and stumbling, much like a toddler. 

“Turing!” 

TOMCAT flinched and looked towards Hayden. He had been sitting hunched over on the armrest of a sofa, observing. His brow was furrowed. 

At his call, the ROM, Turing, gave off a series of surprised electronic beeps. His facial features blinked away and switched to a large explanation point (did he do that consciously?), then back to eyes and a mouth. He looked back at Hayden without a word.

Hayden sighed. “I know that Bob Ross likes to greet his audience like that in the show, but there’s a difference between greeting an anonymous crowd and greeting an individual in real time,” he said. “Do you understand?”

Turing stared at him, his face blank. TOMCAT swore they could hear a faint drone of hardware crunching.

Hayden leaned forward from his perch and spoke in a low, slow tone. “If you understand, Turing, I want you try again. Greet our guest without parroting PBS transcripts, okay? I know you can do it.” 

Turing looked back at TOMCAT, eyes blinking. He reached out his hand again, rubber fingers outstretched. 

TOMCAT took the ‘hand’. They pulled it up, then down. They forced a grin and a syrupy greeting. “Well, howdy, lil fella! I’ve heard a good bit aboutcha from Hayden. Name’s TOMCAT.” 

The social cue seemed to help. Turing’s mouth curled to a grin and his fingers tightened around TOMCAT’s palm. “Hello! I am Turing, a custom ROM built by Hayden Webber. How are you, Miss TOMCAT?” 

An uncomfortable length of silence draped the apartment, though Turing didn’t seem to notice. 

“Oh fuck,” Hayden breathed. “Shit, I, uh. Fuck.” He cleared his throat. Sweat broke on his forehead and his cheeks flushed as he moved to stand and stammer a limp apology.

TOMCAT snorted and waved off Hayden’s bumbling. “Don’t pass out, Hayden. If anything, I just feel validated that my tinkering with the OS worked.”

The LIPS OS built into ROMs accounted for the complexities of gender, after all. No ROM running a legitimate copy of the program would ever assume a client’s gender identity. The error was concrete proof that the backdoor modifications had worked, after all, and TOMCAT couldn’t help but inwardly beam.

_Sure hope Sis would be proud_

“Did I offend you, Miss TOMCAT?” Turing asked. He kept a tight hold on TOMCAT’s hand, looking puzzled. “Is my current protocol in introducing myself improper?” 

“Naw, doll, you’re fine.” If anything, TOMCAT felt more at ease. The flub made Turing feel more natural, more like a human child who had messed up instead of a hunk of plastic reciting the script of an old edutainment show.

Just like that, TOMCAT felt more willing to buy into Turing’s proposed sapience. 

They squatted, feeling their knees crack as they crouched to regard Turing eye-to-eye. “You weren’t ‘improper’, I’m just not a ‘miss’ – I’m TOMCAT.”

Turing blinked. “I do not understand. Do you not wish to be addressed formally?” 

“I’m sorry,” Hayden interjected. He was sweating. “I’m really sorry, TOMCAT. Having the set-up procedure disabled is crucial to having him learn things on his own and…” 

TOMCAT ignored him. They smiled at Turing. “It ain’t that. It’s that I’m not a Miss or a Sir, so you can just fall back on TOMCAT, since that’s my name.” They squeezed his hand. “Does that make sense?”

“Marginally,” said Turing. He looked down at their clasped hands, suddenly looking sheepish. “Mi… TOMCAT, it is my understanding that when referring to other humans in speech, pronouns are assigned to them in order to allow them to differentiate each other. By not utilizing the titles of ‘Miss’ or ‘Mister’, are you forgoing that aspect of identification?” 

“No, because pronouns can extend beyond two stuffy titles. Some folk like bein’ called Miss, and other folk like bein’ called They and Them, and I’m one of those folk.” 

Turing seemed to mull this over with a couple thoughtful beeps, still looking puzzled. “But ‘they’ is used for more than one human…”

“Well, sure. But it’s all in the context, right?” TOMCAT grinned. “Like, if I were to find a jacket someone had lost, I’d say somethin’ like ‘Hey! Did someone lose their jacket?’ and anyone would know that I’d be referring to one person.” 

“Oh!” There was the explanation point again. Turing smiled and gave a couple nods. “That makes sense! Understood. Thank you very much, TOMCAT.” 

“Any more praise and you’ll make me blush, sweetie,” TOMCAT chucked. 

It then occurred to them that this must have been one of Hayden’s motivators in inviting them over, if not the main one. Even if he clearly hadn’t anticipated Turing to call them a ‘miss’, that he hadn’t bothered to teach Turing even the bare basic nuances of human gender said enough. 

TOMCAT felt a prickle at the back of their scalp, and they glanced up at Hayden. He was watching them and Turing intently. He had a notebook and pencil in his hands.

Maybe the AC was just too low, or maybe Turing’s cold hand was getting to them, but a harsh chill coiled up TOMCAT’s back.

_Jesus, calm down, TOM. Didn’t he say he wanted to make observations? It’s just notes._

TOMCAT glanced back at Turing. The ROM was openly studying their face, as if absorbing everything about them. 

Hayden’s voice cut through. “Turing, don’t you have something to give our guest? Remember?” 

“Yes!” Turing’s white-line smile expanded into a digitized toothy grin. He relinquished his grip on TOMCAT’s hand to turn and dash past the kitchen to another room. From the way that he bumped into the walls and seemed to trip over nothing, his hand-eye coordination still left a lot to be desired. 

Clearing his throat (again?), Hayden set aside his notes. Through he was still clearly uncomfortable, his eagerness was taking over. “Well?” he asked, “what do you think of him?”

_Thank god. Shop talk._

“Honestly, I can hardly think straight with it. He’s incredible! You said he was activated a little over a week ago?” TOMCAT gushed, grunting as they stood back up. “Like, he already has the feel of a real individual.” 

“We’re getting there,” said Hayden, keeping it modest, but clearly beaming all the same. “He’s already leaps and bounds ahead of the Grace prototype. I think in about a week we’ll start to see – “

He was cut off when Turing bumbled back into the living room, carrying a canvas that was nearly as tall as himself. TOMCAT could read the eagerness in luminescent eyes that peeked from the top edge. 

The painting itself was a simple sunset landscape, with rich green hilltops matched against an ochre sky. A small wooden cabin-like structure was set on the left framed by bushy pine trees. 

“When Hayden told me someone new was coming, I asked if I could give you one of these.” Turing proudly stretched up his arms and held the canvas over his head. “It’s called ‘Evening’s Glow’ - It’s from Season 30 Episode 12 of ‘The Joy of Painting’ by Bob Ross. Do you like it?”

“Do I like it? Turing, this is amazing!” TOMCAT took the offered canvas and examined it in detail. They whistled. “It’s incredible! Y’know, I reckon this will look right at home in my bedroom. It’ll do the legwork in sprucin’ up the place a bit, heh.”

Hayden stood and walked to Turing’s side, beaming at them both. “Isn’t it neat? Even down to the individual brushstrokes, It’s a perfect replication of the original.”

It was only for a second, but TOMCAT swore they saw Turing’s face flicker and twist into something that looked like… hurt? Confusion? Perhaps both, but it was gone and replaced with that curious half-smile before TOMCAT could be sure.

The rest of the evening passed quickly, with TOMCAT and Hayden making polite chatter that never deviated from work. 

Turing only spoke when spoken to. 

When TOMCAT made to leave, Turing had shaken their hand and smiled, but said little else apart from a polite goodbye. 

It would be another year before TOMCAT ever saw Turing again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I greatly apologize for this taking as long as it did! Moving, the pandemic, and everything else going on really killed my creative drive. I'm really glad to be able to finally get back to work on this and finish it up. For anyone who had read the first chapter in January and enjoyed it, thank you so much for your patience.
> 
> I can't even begin to articulate how much your kind comments have meant. They really motivated me to keep working on this. I hope I can get some more ROM fics out in the wild after this one is wrapped up!

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate narrative where TOMCAT encounters Turing well before the events of the game.


End file.
